Winter Light

**God is Dead. ** What is the meaning of life? In faith in the Lord God? Or maybe in helping people around? In love, in people's desires? ...Or is there no meaning to life at all? Bergman shows the world contemporary to him as the world according to Nietzsche - the decline of Western civilization, where God is metaphorically dead. In this world the priest does not believe in God, a man is ready to kill himself because of an article in the news, a woman is ready to humiliate herself for the sake of love and another priest reads the "Gospels" as a sleeping pill. The protagonist is searching for the meaning of life and is in a state of Nihilism. The worldview imposed on him conflicts with his gut: he wants to believe in God, but God has abandoned him; he wants to love a woman, but she is disgusting to him; he wants to do good, but he is ready to impose only his opinion on everyone; he wants to help a person, but in the end only pushes him to suicide. Faith is in direct conflict with the real world: passions, threats, people and material objects are much closer than a distant and silent God, capable of giving only signs, signs that turned out to be false. The main character, the priest, is presented as a sinner and a hypocrite, moreover, Bergman shows the entire culture of the Church as sinful. He himself was brought up in the environment of the obligatory Protestant faith, but he himself rejected it. But the priest does not reject faith, even if he doubts it. He does not seem to experience moral torment or sympathy for the people around him, which speaks of the egocentrism of the main character, and perhaps of the entire Church. The same can be seen in the stupid comparison of Jesus's torment with the illness of the second priest. What is important is that the main character and his girlfriend are sick. He falls ill shortly before the events of the film, at about the same time that he begins to doubt the existence and reality of God. She has been sick since childhood, one might say cursed. Illnesses can serve as a metaphor for God's punishment, which in turn confirms the words of the main character about the "monster God", about a nasty, petty and evil God who punishes everyone. Bergman himself considers religion hypocritical. And this is clearly seen throughout his film. What happens in it shows the pain of the main character and all his shortcomings as a person, as a servant of God. And the church service, to which no one comes, is a performance of an unbelieving musician at the organ, an unbelieving priest at the "stupid statue" and another unbelieving priest reading soporific "Gospels". The film does a great job of reflecting the ideas of absurdism and nihilism, particularly the philosophy of Nietzsche. But through its prism, Bergman's own opinion is shown, with which one can agree or disagree. Later, he would look even deeper into the question of the meaning of life in his greater work, The Seventh Seal. But here, for the first time, he looks at the question of faith. Faith that does not exist.